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New food database to help consumers understand nutrition

<p>A new food data base to help consumers understand the nutritional value of food they eat is currently in the works and will simplify understanding the nutritional value behind foods we love to eat. </p> <p>Do we really know and understand what is healthy and what isn’t when filling up the cart during your weekly shop?</p> <p>Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) has begun developing a database to help consumers understand the nutritional value of the food they consume.</p> <p>FSANZ General Manager of Science and Risk Assessment, Christel Leemhuis, says the new Branded Food Database will work alongside the Health Star Rating system (HSR) and was requested by the department of Health.</p> <p>"It will allow us to track changes in the nutrient profile of foods over time, the database is targeted at providing a reliable source of information for modelling any future HSR changes."</p> <p>Consumers will be able to access the database online by entering a barcode to see the product’s health information. No scanning app will be available as of yet, but FSANZ hoped to add this consumer friendly feature to the database in time.</p> <p>Despite FSANZ's goal to include 85 per cent of food products available in Australia by 2023, it was up to food producers to opt-in, Ms Leemhuis said.</p> <p>"But by providing information to the database manufactures and retailers will contribute to industry transparency," she said.</p> <p>"We will compare that to our existing food composition databases, so that will allow us to identify if there are any products with a nutrient profile that doesn't look quite right [if we suspect a company is supplying inaccurate information]."</p> <p>Recent changes to the HSR system that prioritise sugar content as an assessment criteria have received harsh criticism from those who grow fruit, as juices are now ranked below diet soft drinks in terms of high sugar content.</p> <p>Agriculture Minister David Littleproud had also previously dubbed the labelling process as “madness” due to the emphasis on sugar content. Ms Leemhuis promises the new database will provide a more thorough breakdown of food’s nutrients.</p>

Food & Wine

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New food database to help consumers understand nutrition

<p><em>Image: Shutterstock </em></p> <p>A new food data base to help consumers understand the nutritional value of food they eat is currently in the works and will simplify understanding the nutritional value behind foods we love to eat. </p> <p>Do we really know and understand what is healthy and what isn’t when filling up the cart during your weekly shop?</p> <p>Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) has begun developing a database to help consumers understand the nutritional value of the food they consume.</p> <p>FSANZ General Manager of Science and Risk Assessment, Christel Leemhuis, says the new Branded Food Database will work alongside the Health Star Rating system (HSR) and was requested by the department of Health.</p> <p>"It will allow us to track changes in the nutrient profile of foods over time, the database is targeted at providing a reliable source of information for modelling any future HSR changes."</p> <p>Consumers will be able to access the database online by entering a barcode to see the product’s health information. No scanning app will be available as of yet, but FSANZ hoped to add this consumer friendly feature to the database in time.</p> <p>Despite FSANZ's goal to include 85 per cent of food products available in Australia by 2023, it was up to food producers to opt-in, Ms Leemhuis said.</p> <p>"But by providing information to the database manufactures and retailers will contribute to industry transparency," she said.</p> <p>"We will compare that to our existing food composition databases, so that will allow us to identify if there are any products with a nutrient profile that doesn't look quite right [if we suspect a company is supplying inaccurate information]."</p> <p>Recent changes to the HSR system that prioritise sugar content as an assessment criteria have received harsh criticism from those who grow fruit, as juices are now ranked below diet soft drinks in terms of high sugar content.</p> <p>Agriculture Minister David Littleproud had also previously dubbed the labelling process as “madness” due to the emphasis on sugar content. Ms Leemhuis promises the new database will provide a more thorough breakdown of food’s nutrients.</p>

Food & Wine

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Europe is creating one of Earth’s largest biometric databases

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The European Parliament voted in favour of a system that would streamline its systems for managing a variety of programs, including travel and border security via a singular database.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The system, called the Common Identity Repository (CIR), would streamline a number of functions, including the ability for officials to search a single database instead of multiple databases, with shared biometric data like fingerprints and images of faces. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The system would also have a repository of personally identifying information, such as date of birth, passport numbers and more.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">According to </span><a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/eu-votes-to-create-gigantic-biometrics-database/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">ZDNet</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, CIR is one of the largest tracking databases on the planet and will amass the records of more than 250 million people into a single database. It will contain identifying information on both citizens and non-citizens of the EU.</span></p> <p><a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-pushes-to-link-tracking-databases/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Politico Europe</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> has said that the new system “will grant officials access to a person’s verified identity with a single fingerprint scan.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The </span><a href="http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190204IPR24914/meps-and-eu-ministers-agree-on-closing-information-gaps-to-enhance-security"><span style="font-weight: 400;">European Parliament</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> has released a statement on the new system, saying that it “will make EU information systems used in security, border and migration management interoperable enabling data exchange between the systems.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Without changing access rights or endangering the data protection rules that govern them, interoperability will ensure faster, more systematic and more complete access to EU information systems for professionals on the ground: police officers, border guards, migration officers and consulate staff members, in order for them to do their job better,” Rapporteur Jeroen Lenaers (EPP, NL) said in a statement at the time. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Better decisions can be made on the basis of better information.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">However, the new system has raised large privacy concerns. A European Commission official told Politico Europe that they didn’t “think anyone understands what they’re voting for”.</span></p>

Technology

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My Health Record: Why deleting your personal information is harder than it sounds

<p><strong><em>Robert Merkel is a lecturer in Software Engineering at Monash University. </em></strong></p> <p>Since the period for opting out of My Health Record began on July 16, experts in health, privacy and IT have raised concerns about the security and privacy protections of the system, and the legislation governing its operation.</p> <p>Now federal health minister Greg Hunt has <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="http://www.health.gov.au/internet/ministers/publishing.nsf/Content/health-mediarel-yr2018-hunt100.htm">announced</a></strong></span> two key changes to the system.</p> <p>First, the legislation will be amended to explicitly require a court order for any documents to be released to a law enforcement agency. Second, the system will be modified to allow the permanent deletion of records:</p> <p><em>In addition, the Government will also amend Labor’s 2012 legislation to ensure if someone wishes to cancel their record they will be able to do so permanently, with their record deleted from the system.</em></p> <p>But while this sounds like a simple change, permanently and completely deleting information from IT systems is anything but straightforward.</p> <p><strong>Systems designed for retention, not deletion</strong></p> <p>The My Health Record database is designed for the long-term retention of important information. Most IT systems designed for this purpose are underpinned by the assumption that the risk of losing information – through a hardware fault, programming mistake, or operator error – should be extremely low.</p> <p>The exact details of how My Health Record data is protected from data loss are not public. But there are several common measures that systems like it incorporate to greatly reduce the risks.</p> <p>At a most basic level, “deletion” of a record stored in a database is often implemented simply by marking a record as deleted. That’s akin to deleting something on paper by drawing a thin line through it.</p> <p>The software can be programmed to ignore any such deleted records, but the underlying record is still present in the database – and can be retrieved by an administrator with unfettered permissions to access the database directly.</p> <p>This approach means that if an operator error or software bug results in an incorrect deletion, repairing the damage is straightforward.</p> <p>Furthermore, even if data is actually deleted from the active database, it can still be present in backup “snapshots” that contain the complete database contents at some particular moment in time.</p> <p>Some of these backups will be retained – untouched and unaltered – for extended periods, and will only be accessible to a small group of IT administrators.</p> <p><strong>Zombie records</strong></p> <p>Permanent and absolute deletion of a record in such a system will therefore be a challenge.</p> <p>If a user requests deletion, removing their record from the active database will be relatively straightforward (although even this has some complications), but removing them from the backups is not.</p> <p>If the backups are left unaltered, we might wonder in what circumstances the information in those backups would be made accessible.</p> <p>If, by contrast, the archival backups are actively and irrevocably modified to permit deletion, those archival backups are at high risk of other modifications that remove or modify wanted data. This would defeat the purpose of having trusted archival backups.</p> <p><strong>Backups and the GDPR's 'right to be forgotten'</strong></p> <p>The problem of deleting personal information and archival backups has been raised in the context of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (<span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/priorities/justice-and-fundamental-rights/data-protection/2018-reform-eu-data-protection-rules_en">GDPR</a></strong></span>). This new EU-wide law greatly strengthens privacy protections surrounding use of personal information in member states.</p> <p>The “right to erasure” or “right to be forgotten” – <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/">Article 17</a></strong></span> of the GDPR – states that organisations storing the personal information of EU citizens “shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay” in certain circumstances.</p> <p>How this obligation will be met in the context of standard data backup practices is an interesting question, to say the least. While the legal aspects of this question are beyond my expertise, from a technical perspective, there is no easy general-purpose solution for the prompt deletion of individual records from archived data.</p> <p>In an <a href="https://www.acronis.com/en-us/blog/posts/backups-and-gdpr-right-be-forgotten-recommendations"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>essay</strong></span></a> posted to their corporate website, data backup company Acronis proposes that companies should be transparent about what will happen to the backups of customers who request that records be deleted:</p> <p><em>[while] primary instances of their data in production systems will be erased with all due speed … their personal data may reside in backup archives that must be retained for a longer period of time – either because it is impractical to isolate individual personal data within the archive, or because the controller is required to retain data longer for contractual, legal or compliance reasons.</em></p> <p><strong>Who might access those backups?</strong></p> <p>Data stored on archival backups, competently administered, will not be available to health professionals. Nor will they be available to run-of-the-mill hackers who might steal a practitioner’s credentials to gain illicit access to My Health Record.</p> <p>But it’s not at all clear whether law enforcement bodies, or anyone else, could potentially access a deleted record if they are granted access to archival backups by the system operator.</p> <p>Under amended legislation, such access would undoubtedly require a court order. Nevertheless, were it to be permitted, access to a deleted record under these circumstances would be contrary to the general expectation that when a record is deleted, it is promptly, completely and irrevocably deleted, with no prospect of retrieval.</p> <p><strong>Time required to work through the details </strong></p> <p>In my view, more information on the deletion process, and any legislative provisions surrounding deleted records, needs to be made public. This will allow individuals to make an informed choice on whether they are comfortable with the amended security and privacy provisions.</p> <p>Getting this right will take time and extensive expert and public consultation. It is very difficult to imagine how this could take place within the opt-out period, even taking into account the <a href="https://www.news.com.au/national/breaking-news/ehealth-records-opt-out-period-extended/news-story/d245f3601ee494959b854eb9b8c8ae15"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>one-month extension</strong></span></a> just announced by the minister.</p> <p>Given that, it would be prudent to pause the roll-out of My Health Record for a considerably longer period. This would permit the government to properly address the issues of record deletion, as well as the numerous other privacy and security concerns raised about the system.</p> <p><em>Written by Robert Merkel. Republished with permission of <a href="https://theconversation.com"><strong><u>The Conversation.</u></strong> </a></em></p> <p><img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100962/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-advanced" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" /></p>

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